[Foundation-l] 1.3 billion of humans don't have Wikipedia in their native language

Milos Rancic millosh at gmail.com
Sun May 22 12:47:05 UTC 2011


On 05/22/2011 01:37 PM, Nikola Smolenski wrote:
> On Sun, 2011-05-22 at 13:15 +0200, Milos Rancic wrote:
>> * Jin Chinese, 45M, China
>> * Xiang Chinese, 36, China, incubator
>> * Min Bei Chinese, 10.3M, China, incubator
> 
> Aren't these languages written with Chinese characters and thus their
> speakers can read and write the Chinese Wikipedia?

Chinese script is logo-syllabic. That means that other Chinese languages
may be different from the standard one in syllabic and syntactic part.

For example, you don't want to write in English phrase like "boy girl
and" (different syntax), as well as it would sound strange to write
"boyf and girlf" for plural (different suffixes/syllables), even the
roots could be written at the same way.

Besides that, two of three languages have incubator projects, which
means that they think that they should have Wikipedia in their languages.



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